1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic response and loopback method for remote quality measurement in Internet telephony and, more particularly, to an automatic response and loopback method for remote quality measurement in Internet telephony wherein a quality measurement instrument wishing to measure Internet telephony quality can place a call to an Internet phone without causing inconvenience to the user of the Internet phone and without affecting utilization of supplementary Internet telephony services.
2. Related Prior Art
In recent years, Internet phones (IP phones) that deliver voice and video calls through the Internet have been rapidly popularized.
Unlike standard telephones using public switched telephone networks (PSTN) based on circuit switching, IP phones use IP networks (IP addresses) based on packet switching.
IP phones may be divided into wired VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones and wireless Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) phones. Reduction in network investment costs due to integration of telephone networks and data networks, reduction in management costs and increase in efficiency owing to construction of integrated networks, and easy adoption of Internet-based multimedia services such as video conferencing are expected to rapidly increase the number of IP phones in the near future.
Unlike the PSTN using dedicated lines, IP networks using flexible lines may experience high packet loss and significant delay depending upon network traffic. In comparison to PSTN telephony, IP telephony tends to be poor in terms of quality of service (QoS) and hence needs more accurate QoS measurement.
That is, VoIP services requiring strict real-time properties may experience significant quality degradation owing to real-time limitations of IP networks. Hence, it is necessary for VoIP service providers to continuously perform quality measurement and failure analysis to resolve customer dissatisfaction due to quality degradation in voice communication and to ensure an effective level of voice communication quality for customers.
As part of an effort to ensure IP telephony quality, in a related art method for measuring IP telephony quality, a maintenance technician carrying a measurement instrument is dispatched to a site where a quality problem has occurred and measures IP telephony quality using the measurement instrument. This method is inefficient in terms of time and cost.
In another related art method for remote real-time quality measurement, a quality measurement instrument is installed in a management center and a measurement function is realized in IP phones. Later, to measure IP telephony quality in real-time, the quality measurement instrument installed in the management center may send a quality measurement request to a particular IP phone and analyze looped back results from the IP phone.